David Brat, the Elizabeth Warren of the Right

On January 14th, David Brat, the college professor who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday, in a Republican primary in Virginia, was reading the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section when the premise of his improbable campaign was revealed to him.

Randall Stephenson, the C.E.O. of AT&T, had recently been named chairman of the Business Roundtable, a pro-Republican group that is made up of C.E.O.s from major American companies and has spent well over a hundred million dollars lobbying Congress during the past decade. Stephenson was a good fit for the organization. AT&T is known as a G.O.P.-leaning company; in their political donations, its political-action committees and employees have favored Republicans over Democrats almost two to one in the past two election cycles. Stephenson’s piece, which came after a year of Tea Party-inspired upheaval in the House, was called “A Business Short List for Growth,” and in it he laid out his group’s policy agenda for Congress in 2014. At the top of the list for Stephenson was “stability,” by which he meant an end to the crisis policymaking that has regularly threatened a government shutdown or debt default in recent years.

Brat, a free-market purist and a devotee of Ayn Rand, read the op-ed and turned to his wife. As he recounted several times on the trail this spring, he told her, “This guy just wrote my stump speech for me!” What was useful to Brat about the Wall Street Journal article was not that it echoed his own views, but that it clarified for him everything that Cantor was for and that Brat was against. “Stability,” for Brat, was simply code for a status quo in which companies like AT&T fleece the government.

From what I’ve observed, Brat has not talked like a forty-seven-per-cent conservative complaining about how tax dollars are being shovelled to the undeserving poor (although maybe he does believe that and didn’t emphasize it in the campaign). He comes across, instead, like a ninety-nine-per-cent conservative who sees the real villain as corporate America and its addiction to government largesse. One of his biggest applause lines is about how bankers should have gone to jail after the 2008 financial crisis. Brat is the Elizabeth Warren of the right.

The divisions within the Republican Party since 2010 are not always obvious from the shorthand we commonly use: Tea Party versus establishment, conservatives versus moderates, outsiders versus insiders. Brat’s stump speech, inspired by the country’s top corporate-lobbying group, was notable for the clarity with which it defined these often opaque categories. Eric Cantor “is running on the Chamber of Commerce growth plan,” Brat told a small gathering at the Life Church in Hanover, Virginia, last April. “The Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable. If you’re in big business, he’s good for you. But if you’re in any other group, it’s not good for you.”

What Wall Street was asking from Washington was, “Just keep it stable for us so we can make profits.” Brat went on:

I’m an economist. I’m pro-business. I’m pro-big business making profits. But what I’m absolutely against is big business in bed with big government. And that’s the problem.

Put aside for a second whether it’s actually true that a C.E.O.’s plea for an end to fiscal brinksmanship is actually a mask for extracting corporate subsidies. The more interesting phenomenon is that, for Tea Party conservatives, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page had morphed into the voice of the enemy.

In his campaign against Cantor, Brat turned every issue into a morality tale about big business cheating ordinary Americans. He attacked Cantor for supporting the farm bill (“Do those billions of dollars go to the small American farmer? No, they go to huge agribusiness, right? Big business again.”), the flood-insurance bill (“Who does that go to? A lot of the money goes to gazillionaires on both coasts who have homes in nice real-estate locations.”), and the STOCK Act, an effort to stop insider trading by congressmen, which Cantor gutted by including an exception for spouses. In his Stephenson-inspired stump speech, Brat was more worked up about the STOCK Act than anything else. He promised, “If you tell your friends or neighbors about this issue, I will be your next congressman!”

Granted, at the core of Brat’s ideology is an unvarnished belief, one that does not maintain majority support in any recent national poll that I have encountered, that the government should return to its pre-New Deal roots. This is not surprising. He’s a libertarian. But his message, which today is being embraced by Tea Party candidates around the country, is also sharply different from the Romney-Ryan view of limited government celebrated by Republicans in 2012.

Instead of lecturing the most vulnerable about the moral beauty of the marketplace, Brat targets the most well off. “Free markets!” he declared in Hanover, like a teacher about to reveal the essence of the lesson. “In a nutshell, what does it mean?”

It means no one is shown favoritism. Everyone is treated equally. Every firm, every business, and you compete fairly. And no one, if you’re big or small, is shown special attention. And we’re losing that.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the kind of rhetoric that Ralph Nader, and even Noam Chomsky, have used for many years to pillory the government for protecting the rich and the well connected from the vagaries of the free market.

By the end of the campaign, immigration reform, another policy championed by Stephenson in his op-ed, had become Brat’s most visible point of attack against Cantor. But even here, Brat framed the issue within his larger argument about corporate welfare, arguing that the Senate bill would reward big business with a stream of cheap labor at the expense of American workers. (And anyone who followed the debate over the Senate bill knows that it was larded with favors for big corporations.)

Of course, Brat is hardly the first Republican to articulate a conservative-populist case against big business—that element has been present in the Tea Party since its inception. But it’s important to note that his astonishing victory last night over the sitting Majority Leader was not just about amnesty. As far as I have seen, it was not an anti-immigrant campaign specifically capitalizing on nativist sentiment. Brat ran an anti-Wall Street and an anti-corporate-welfare campaign, and it won’t be the last one.

Cantor was oblivious to the wave that was building back in his district, in the suburbs of Richmond. On the morning of the election, he was at a Washington coffee shop raising money from lobbyists.

Photograph by P. Kevin Morley/Richmond Times-Dispatch/AP.

Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.